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31 October 2011

Commitment

National Novel Writing Month. Long have you hunted me. Long have I eluded you. No more. Behold! A shred of commitment!

I mean to enter NaNoWriMo this year and I'm concerned. I'm concerned not only because I have a baby due the first week of December who is as like to come onto the scene beforehand (and interrupt whatever writing process I have begun), but because writing 50,000 words is a feat.

My hope is that taking part in this project, and the competition provided in the word-bout between my Atlanta and Seattle, will serve as motivation enough to bang out a full novel of original material. I have some pretty cool ideas and I think I just might do it.

In short, it will be the story of Ferhan: a Turkish engineer at the end of the First World War and at the end of his rope. The Empire he once served so dutifully is no more, his family has been destroyed in the process, and the airships he helped to invent did nothing to turn the tide for his country. Now, with European interlopers descending upon the Middle East in search of the one resource the Ottoman's kept hidden (the one that allows, like, airship and floating cities), Ferhan decides it is his destiny to make a difference and maybe, just maybe, redeem his life.

Writing it like that makes it sound kind of trite but I look forward to doing some historical fiction in a setting I love (Southwest Asia).